The Praise Singer Read Online Free PDF

left of their own accord. Truly I owed poor Endios a tomb; he has saved my life many a time. Some of my best friends have been doctors, and excellent people they were, most knowledgeable about the minds of men, whom they see when poets do not. But doctors are taught their laws, and they keep those laws if it kills you. Some of them here in Sicily come asking how a wanderer like me has kept such good health to past fourscore. I tell them this or that. It would be uncivil to say that whenever in my travels I get a touch of fever, I go quietly to bed and send for the local wise-woman.
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    AMONG THE TROUBLES all men are heir to, I have had good things from the gods. I have been honored by kings and princes and cities, and by men of my own craft, and have been pleased with it, more I daresay than men with less need of esteem. I have rejoiced in what I made: in making it, in singing it, in getting paid for it, all delightful things. But brightest of all, after nearly seventy years, shines in my memory the day I sailed from Keos.
    It was a clear morning, just wind enough to fill the sail and spare the rowers. The ship was new, the eyes on the prow fresh-painted; the cargo was clean, mostly pots and figs, and smelled as delicious to me as spices. I shouldered my master’s baggage with as much pride as a knight takes in his horse. It was the first mark of my new calling.
    When the sailors had told me w?here to put it, and shoved me out of their way, I stood at the rail and looked back at the harbor. It seemed like a foreign port already. I was amazed to see Theas appear and wave. He jumped aboard, paid his respects to my master, and looked about him with wistful eyes. I saw, hardly believing it, that he envied me.
    Getting me in a corner where they had finished lading, he put a hand on my shoulder. “We’ve never talked, not as men. I’m telling you now, never think you can’t come back here, and be somebody at home. When you’ve seen other cities, and how men live there, you’ll think we must be poor folk. Well, we’re not poor, Sim, and we never have been. Sometime I mean to see the world myself, and I’ll not need to work my passage. Nor you. You’ve chosen a calling with plenty of ups and downs, not that I blame you. But one day there’ll be enough for both of us, I promise you that.”
    He had had thoughts like mine. Like me, he would not own to them.
    “I must go,” he said. “I’ve the thralls to mind in the ten-acre. If the father sees them idling, he’ll be asking them where I am. Here.” He undid a buckle at his belt. “This is for you. You’ll likely need it sooner than I would. Don’t you be the one to start, that’s all.”
    He held out his dearest treasure, a good knife with silver studs on its horn handle. It had been a prize at the games, for throwing the disk and javelin; I had never seen him without it, except when without his clothes. He strapped it on my belt, and embraced me. Next moment we were both in tears. We had not much thought till now that we would miss each other: I a protector, a hero in whom to trust, and he a worshipper-what man is displeased with that? But we were young, we would not die of it. We wiped our eyes and parted; and Kleobis gave us the long look of a poet getting a phrase for a song.
    SAMOS

The Praise Singer
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    YES, I owed Endios a tomb. In death he was my benefactor.
    By Keos reckoning, Kleobis must always have been an easy master. But no one can travel without some hardship; being used to it himself, he had naturally supposed that what he could bear at sixty could not hurt a strong lad of fifteen. He took the death hard, the son of a friend and benefactor. On our voyage out, he kept going over the boy’s last days; his getting wet on the ship coming from Ephesos; his climbing up from Koressia in maybe too hot a sun, carrying a bag which was maybe too heavy; his sitting outdoors at the wedding when the fever must have been on him. The upshot of all this was that now